SVVR: DreamWorks Announces DreamWorks VR

For the first day of the 2015 Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) Conference at the San Jose Convention Center, Brad Herman of DreamWorks Animation took the stage to make a VR announcement and preview some of their latest work.

Brad Herman is head of the Dream Lab division at DreamWorks Animation. Dream Lab is a storytelling division focused on creating everything from rides, to augmented reality, and virtual reality experiences for the company and who today announced the launch of the DreamWorks VR platform for the Gear VR smartphone-based virtual reality headset.

Interactive VR experience for Penguins of Madagascar

The DreamWorks VR platform was developed to as a DreamWorks hub for content distribution. For the launch, three pieces of content are now available, all three of which he called “theater trailer experiences”. The content available includes a twenty year retrospective piece on the studio, another for their recent release of Home, and the last being an interactive experience for Penguins of Madagascar. The penguin trailer experience was described as being able to interact with elements, “if you look and interact with characters they will actually look and interact back with you.”

Dragon Flight VR simulation

Also during his preview, Herman went into greater length discussing their Dragon Flight VR simulation, which could make it to Gear VR as well in the future. The Dragon Flight VR experience took a combination of 30 people over 13 weeks to put together.

10 of over 10,000 flight paths of different users flying a dragon

The ‘interactive theater trailer experiences’ are free to download and available on both versions of the Gear VR platform.

In case you missed it today, you can watch the full recorded SVVR talk with Brad Herman on YouTube as well.